Thursday, February 4, 2016

We Are Step 2

I'm an awful blogger. Is that like an awful waffle?

Just after my last post in January, Hunter and I went on vacation to DC and Philadelphia. We had a wonderful and fantastic time :D It all started on a train from Atlanta to DC. I've been on a train in Russia before, but this one was a little bit different. Surprisingly(?) cleaner, tons of space and relaxation; overall, pretty awesome!.. save for the fact that we did not have water in our car for the 16-hour trip. That was kind of a bummer. I was able to get some sleep, but I was pretty excited to be going to our nation's capital for the first time. Especially considering I've been to 2 other nations' capitals before our own...

Obligatory "Carl on your head" photo at Hunter's Aunt Nancy's house.

We arrived early in the morning, and were able to quickly navigate around using the subway. Their entire system was amazing! Our hotel room was ready, so we swiftly dropped our things off and headed out to the National Mall. We spent the rest of the day in the Air and Space Museum (including seeing a planetarium show!!!), and still didn't see everything. I guess that's not very surprising, these places are huge. We made sure to see most of the monuments around, including touching the Washington Monument. That was pretty fun! It's so big! (That's what she said.)

Ice skating rink in the park!

It's hard to tell that this was an optical illusion from the picture, but it was neat in the park!

Unfortunately, it was really fucking cold, and neither of us were particularly prepared for the weather. It made walking around a bit uncomfortable. Before we went to DC, I was told that some of the best food ever is there, mostly due to all of the ethnicity is around. However, it seems that we were not in the right location for such fantastic cuisine :( But it was okay! We managed to find decent pubs (and one pretentious one.)

The second DC day, we headed over to the Library of Congress, something Hunter really wanted to tour. Neither of us had any idea what to expect. The place was gigantic, and reminded me a lot of parliament in Ottawa. It was very beautiful, and apparently was quite expensive and timely to build. From there we spent the remainder of our day at the Natural History Museum. I would have liked to gone to the zoo, but I figured the animals would be pretty smart and would be hibernating. The Smithsonian was a good choice! They had an exhibit on minerals and gems that was pretty fascinating. And I actually StumbleUpon'd a link to their site that allows you tour from anywhere! Pretty impressive. Of course, we also had to find at least one geocache period so we did just that ^^

Hunter and his pangdolin :)

Me and my platypus!! ^^

The Christmas magic has been broken :(

By evening time, it was time for us to make our train to Philadelphia. However, Amtrak had decided to move the schedule of 30 minutes, so when we were arriving at the train station at what we thought was a half hour early, we were a few seconds too late. The lady we spoke with who worked for Amtrak was very accommodating, and was able to move us on to the last train at the night that was set to arrive in an hour and a half. It was going to be pretty late, but that was okay. We got to sit down and have a little dinner before getting on the train.

The train to Philadelphia was significantly shorter, just over an hour. However, there was a very pungent person seated just in front of us on the train. Luckily, there were not very many people on the train so we were able to move seems to be much, much farther away from him. Kevin medicine the 30th Street Station, and brought us to his house. We got to meet his girlfriend, Michele, before heading out for a quick drink before bed.

Cat! (Shaak Ti)

The next couple of days we spent exploring a little bit of Philadelphia (historic-wise) but it was significantly less exciting than DC. Although, it's always great to see my best friend, so that at the very least was totally worth the trip. However, I don't think his girlfriend was very excited to have us visiting them. She didn't speak to us much at all, even when I would do my best to talk to her. She really wasn't interested. Oh well! Hunter and I still had a really great, fun time :D We ate at a bunch of great restaurants, did a metric ton of walking, and even went ice skating! AND I didn't fall on my ass the entire time! I was quite proud of myself.

We did a tour of the original house/Senate buildings. Everything was mock furniture, EXCEPT the chair at the front of this room. Washington's ass was in that chair!! :o

Their favourite sushi place was in New Jersey. It was delicious! :)

Other cat! (Carrots)

There's a guy in Philly who does this crazy art everywhere with shiny shards.

This was probably my favourite place we went to: The Reading Terminal Market. It's a former train station converted into an immense market of shops! Shops of all kinds! Food! Butchers! Bakers! Grocers! Wish we had one of these in town.

Our train trip back was a little less thrilling, but Hunter and I made the most of it, playing a Civilization Beyond Earth game. Even though I lost (surprisingly :P ). There was a very drunk, possibly mentally distraught, man only a few seats away from us who made a bit of a ruckus. He almost got kicked off for bringing his own bottle of vodka on-board :d

Since being back in Knoxville, school is back in session! I'm taking Data Algorithms I, and Rebecca is in my class again. It's nice to have a friendly face there; somebody to talk with.

Finally feel moved into the new house! It's been wonderful, and almost everything is unpacked, save for some of my books.

SNOOOOOW! :D

Work has been pretty busy; consistent, really. Nothing bad. I did get a promotion, and a raise!

I love the "new" 94.3 radio station :) It's like they've tapped into a third of my music library!

Hunter and I have gotten back into World of Warcraft, a little bit. Funny story actually, he really wanted to get into raiding since he never got to back in the day. I've done my fair share of raiding, so it didn't matter either way to me, but I do have a few friends who still play, so I asked Morthar if we could play with him and his guild. He was very accepting, of course, and told me what server he had moved to. Hunter and I made Horde characters, used the free level 90 boost to get going, and made it all the way to level 100. Then, Jon went to invite us to the guild, and explained that he could not. Apparently, he had switched to the Alliance side during his server transfer -_-;;;

All of my friends who used to play Horde now play Alliance. Sad panda :( I felt bad for leading Hunter astray. But it's okay! We've started new characters, and with leveling the way it is now (especially with dungeons) it takes practically no time to get a level 100. We will be there soon!

I feel really gross playing Alliance :P

Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun.